Lately, we’re in the office quite a lot, especially myself. I added the job of DTS registrar in mid-January, which has been a lot e-mailing and filing, and since there’s only one office computer, I’ve also been the main person to forward or handle the rest of Closkelt’s office correspondence. Most of my time in the office, however, I’ve been trying to organize the DTS programme, collecting and creating training, administration, discipleship, financial, evaluation, and legal information and organizing it in such a way that new DTS leaders can have a definite place to start and so that experience will be recorded and passed onwards. And we’ve both been using the office to look ahead to the fall as well. Renee has worked on methods and schedules for training DTS staff, while I’ve corresponded with students and organizing potential lecturers, and it’s nice now that she’s taken a step back from the classroom to join me with the work in there.

However, work-weeks mostly spent in the office are new to me, and I think my brain is catching up with the repetition. I’m well used to being in and out of the office in my time with YWAM, but whole days are a new phenomenon. In some respects, I’m good with office work – I’m organized and enjoy writing – but in areas of sorting out detail after detail, communicating repetitive information, and reading various documentation, I’m working out of my weaknesses. I like to make new things or make weak things stronger, and although that’s really the bigger picture of our office work, I’d much rather get the ideas, figure out the plan, and have someone who likes administration making the copies, finding the addresses, and stuffing the envelopes.

Outreach logistics

This week and next week will be crunch time for finalizing all the logistics for the DTS outreaches leaving on the 6th of May. We’re excited at sending out twelve students and two staff between Ireland and India, and we’re happy to serve in order to get them ready to go. The next week will see meetings with staff to double check locations and details, as well as some of the finer details of handling issues within the teams. Our finances person is away, so Renee and I have been doing the budgets for the first time, as well as figuring out exactly how much everyone owes, etc. We are trusting God to bring in about £4,000 to make it possible for everyone to go on outreach.